157. Jack Frawley | Blessed

Jack Frawley delights in the conjunction of profound text and the institutions of turf racing - the Jockeys silk associated with a particular horses name.

The nature of profundity that hovers uncomfortably close to that of the cliche and the con rests in the passage from the Bible, Mathew 5 : 3 - 10. Jack Frawley’s translation underlines this apparent irony with wit, style and considerable humour.

BLESSED

Blessed are the poor in sprit,

for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are they who mourn,

for they shall be comforted.

Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for righteousness

for they shall be satisfied.

Blessed are the merciful,

for they shall obtain mercy.

Blessed are the pure of heart,

for they shall see God.

Blessed are the peacemakers,

for they shall be called children of God.

Blessed are they who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Mathew 5 : 3-10

 Kathryn Cowen’s piece is an illumination in ultra violet. She comments “The intention was to create a strange environment that is inspired by the world and yet presents a portal to an alternate reality; a meeting place of the real and the imagined.”

This pink Si-Fi land scape has a double life. By day it is a fairy tale by night the mood of the piece changes dramatically as Kathryn explains “ For the first time I have incorporated light as a medium. In order to explore my interest in time, space, place and memory; two versions of the landscape are held within the one painting…Once darkness descends, ultraviolet light interacts with the painted work in order to transform the space and reveal an alternate dimension, a world that is “Other”. 

Ana Pollak’s father and her grandparents came to Australia as refugees from Europe while Ana has lived for the last 30 years, in a house she built with her partner David on Dangar Island in the Hawkesbury River. Ana is no stranger to an Australian landscape covered in trees.

Her towers are an idea she carried with her to Hong Kong, another island where the verticality of the eucalypt gives way to the built environment. There, multi story buildings are encountered at a middle level, like Ana’s towers, with out reference to the top or bottom.

In Hong Kong as a guest of the Nock Art Foundation to study calligraphy, where she says the “people embraced me in the brotherhood of the line.” Ana makes drawings, impressively she won the celebrated Dobell Drawing Prize in 2007 and before all else these towers should be considered as drawings made with lines, she describes collecting “outside the front door”, on Dangar Island.

Looking at Ana’s towers I find myself reflecting on the bamboo scaffolding used on the building sites of South East Asian cities. Structures Ana said she had marvelled at in Hong Kong where they are tightly wrapped in a fabric covering. These enigmatic structures have something in common. It is that a person made the decision on the spot, about how to fit one “line” into another. About which piece of material or “line” was best suited to bridge a particular gap. A person solved a problem and it’s that solution that is art because along the way it picked up something of the persons humanity. In fairness birds, animals even insects make comparable structures that present as ART. Their work points to the universality of Ana’s expression. It reaches from the devastation of war-torn Europe across an Australian idle to our Asian neighbours, “the brotherhood of line” indeed.

Back in Australia and after 6 weeks in her studio Ana made this! Prompting the questions - What do you seen in your imagery? Her response, “pass”. What is your process? – “pass”. How do you begin? – “pass”. And how do you conclude? “That’s the tricky thing that everyone’s having a problem with, when the tower falls over, when it gets too tall for the studio”. Apparently this is a liner experience with out beginning or end designed to be appreciated from the middle out, like trees and sky-scrapers.

Pamela was born in Hong Kong with the desire to be an artist. She became a window dresser. As an adult she left home with a 3 month Australian tourist visa in her pocket, became a wife, then a mother and a businesswoman. 

Always a hard worker, a decade ago she turned her back on home for a second time with nothing more than the desire to make art in her pocket.

Education, the Australian key to change began at TAFE for Pamela. A one-year Diploma in Art became an undergraduate course in sculpture at the National Art School, then an honours year in drawing and finally a master’s degree in painting. It is an Australian education that has given us Pamala’s art works that she flatly states, “draw on the idea of hope” that is the migrant’s vision. It’s a glorious one although tempered by dislocation, social injustice and the plea, “sorry I no understand”.

Pamela asks, “ the title has been said thousands of times but how often has it been heard or understood?” When I read it I can’t help recalling Pauline Hanson’s infamous retort, “please explain”. Explanation and understanding don’t often include empathy. Empathy is something we leave to artists who, however educated in our societies manners have the need to be heard, in this case gloriously so in neon above a carpet of trampled eggshells. This is a work of innuendo read in material and metaphoric terms that propose 

tolerance, not of anything in particular but as an act of faith.

Adam is a northern European, New Zealand bone man who arrived in Sydney, as a 15 year old via the Gold Coast, but that probably isn’t why his song is not your song.

Drawing, 9 hours a week was the basic training he received while studying sculpture at the National Art School. According to Adam it’s “a method of honing the eye”. After a stint at the Sydney College of Art his education gave way to the need for making. And this he says is a drawing.

Hearing Adam talk about his work is like listening to a detailed discussion about the function of drawing: “always about taking inanimate forms and animating them”; “try not to make it about the self, to make it about the other”; “keep it open ended”; “suspend logic as a way of holding the viewer to the work”.

We must look and look again at this precariously attractive image that is drawn from intuition. There is no plan here. History is little more than a license to practice assemblage. Intuition for Adam is filtered through 

daydreams. He describes states of mind when in tiredness dreams flash behind our eyes in the space between waking and the assertion of consciousness. “It mirrors the narrative of found objects, which have lost their function and are in the process of finding new ones.”

A key to the work is the yellow painting in the top left had corner. Visually it’s a crucial element that Adam says was painted by his son, playfully in his studio somewhere in the past. For Adam, it offers fatherhood as a premise for the work, “the camel trying to pass through the needles eye” as Adam comments in a fractured metaphor that draws his melancholy quest for innocence.

Sally Clarke’s “The Wonder Quilt” could be part of a concise exhibition currently on display at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Three works from the 1970’s and 80’s, each made in a technique usually associated with women’s craft. Ewa Pachucka a Polish artist then living in Sydney crocheted a vast sculptural installation, a Melbourne artist Elizabeth Gower contributed a wall sculpture sewn from diaphanous fabric while the American Miriam Schapiro’s work is a collage of appliquéd fabrics. Each work, like Sally’s has one foot in the notionally male orientated tradition of fine art and another in the notionally home spun female craft of sewing and each stakes a claim for a Feminist voice with in our understanding of art.

Satirically Sally offers a further analogy with “women’s work” by choosing a domestic cleaning product “Wonder Cloths” as her quilting medium. She further challenges the masculine concept of the author, the so-called auteur by working from within a collective of collaborating artists - Lesley Clarke, Brenda Factor, Frances Factor and Trudi Factor.

This is not a heroic expression of individuality that proposes an alternate reality. It is a subversive conversation that succeeds in altering our collective understanding of the way things are - which is the project of Feminism.

Jenny Pollak’s work, Dictionary of Love and Loss is about language. The Dharug language of the indigenous people of the Sydney basin, which includes the lower reaches of the Hawkesbury River where Jenny lives.

Chillingly, the absence of their language along the banks of the Hawkesbury recalls Kate Grenville’s colonial history, The Secret River and the TV series of the same name that documents the xenophobic slaughter of the Dharug speakers.

Those people live, in a way, in the bones scattered across Pollak’s chairs each marked in language as part of a family group, mother, father, daughter, son. They sit as a lament for a world that progresses inexorably towards a utopian global homogenisation.

The uniformity of material satisfaction comes with its own xenophobia that silences the other as effectively as the Dharug speakers were slaughtered two centuries ago. Our bones might be added to Pollak’s chairs and shrouded there in a mist of language that speaks only of this place, Dharug.

Language is the tool of colonisation. It’s the open door into our brains where the work of colonisation is done. But while Dharug survives, and we are thinking of it now colonisation is challenged.

Stephen Flanagan is not an artist. 

He’s cagey about what he is but is clear on the fact that he has come from industry. His working life started at 16 as an apprentice Instrument Artificer. That translates as a mechanical craftsman who worked with instruments. They might have been, hydraulic or nematic or electrical, but they were all calibrated. They were tuned, they were maintained with the attention that a craftsman brings to art. For Stephen it is a bygone era, now digital instruments self calibre at the press of a button, or don't in which case they are replaced. 

In his own words, Stephen is “a discerning collector of useless materials” who came across a cash of ancient blue prints while exploring some of the redundant industrial sites along Botany Road. It doesn’t matter whether or not these drawings are art or not, their lines do a dance in the blue print process. It gives them a legibility that rests in a blur of something that doesn’t quite become a photograph. They are mechanical, 100%.

“The theme is the demise of the manufacturing industry and the dominance of residential development” is how Stephen described his work then ruefully went on to observe that residential construction is “just about the only industry left in Australia.” Sure enough the mechanical era is being brushed aside to make way for the technological, in the relentless march to wards a promised and just utopia along Botany Road.

And along this march Stephen the connoisseur of industry past found pause for thought in a bundle of drawings, meticulously crafted, judiciously archived that have now been given the mantle of art, another transitory condition perhaps? A sort of half way house between the stuff of reality and the stuff of museums where things make it clear that it’s not only artists who make art.

Mark Dubner lists his teachers as Bob Boynes, Merilyn Fairskye, Ruth Waller and Mandy Martin, once the painting teachers at the Canberra School of Art. After art school he put an economics degree he had picked up at uni to good use in a job at the Bureau of Statistics in Canberra. The job lasted 30 years. But he always maintained a studio, a shrine to the idea of being an artist, perhaps, or as a locus of reflection,simultaneously physical and metaphysical?

Now Mark’s time is split between foreign aid projects in the Solomon Islands and Timor, short courses at the National Art School where he studies metal sculpture and a studio in Marrickville, which is where Progeny came into being.

Progenyis a “respite from intuition” for Mark. He wanted something that was an illusion not an explanation of a fatalistic idea. He came up with lumps of clay that are like the stuff people are made from. “It’s fatalistic, all those heads present different pathways that end up in the same place.” he observed.

It’s pointless of course to ask an artist what their work is about. Their considered response to that question is staring you in the face. It is the work it’s self. Here is a meditation on destiny and desire that encapsulates the kind of life lived around here. A life that has a beginning and an end lived across a passage of lives that reaches beyond any particular beginning or end.

Progeny proposes a question for me – is it fatalistic that our lives turn out pretty much like most other lives or is it that we are all living the same life? Either way, Marks cypher, the traced outline of his partner walks lightly through this landscape of lives lived.